Takumi knows
by pennedbyme
Summary: He is a selfish and self-centred man. If he hadn't been so genuinely kind, perhaps Reira and Hiachi might have had a chance to break away.


Takumi knows that he is at fault for all his life has turned out to be.

She had been his angel that lit his life with her voice, when the world had been too dark and too confusing for such young lives to experience.

_He can still feel the terror, the hatred, the stale smell of alcohol and sweat, and the swing of each fist. He remembers too, the rancid yellow of the cup ramen soup, and the loneliness of many nights at the kitchen table._

He wanted a family. A proper, happy one. And he could not ignore the opportunity to grasp it with both hands when he realized that this pleasing, young lovesick girl could be pregnant with his child. If he could have it all – and he tried to – he knew how his kingdom would play out:

A happy, loving wife at home with their cute children to make up the family he never had but always had longed for – "_If Hiachi leaves me, everything would be a battlefield for me." _

And also (and never just).. Trapnest at the height of its fame, moving fans with their music, the same music that had pulled each band member out of their personal darkness. It was _not simply a business. _It was his castle that he had brought into fruition with the sweat of his brow.

_His castle where Reira belonged._

Reira, with her angel's voice, singing beside him - _forever. _She is his caged bird, a possession trapped in her gilded cage for him to use her song. He never did try to lie to himself that he had built his kingdom for Reira. After all, Takumi knows fully that he is a selfish, self-centred man. Even if he is, without trying to be, extremely kind.

"_I chose Takumi because he was the most kind to me."_

He would protect Trapnest at all costs because it was his kingdom and he was the King who built it.

He would always take care of Reira, because how can any fairy-tale kingdom exist without a beautiful, perfect princess as its crown jewel?

He would never let Hiachi go because she was his family, and every man, even those with a crown, needed a beloved wife and home to rest their weary souls.

And because he was kind, he had hoped they would all be happy in the life he had created for them. He had hoped for Naoki and Ren to be thrilled by their success, and had not begrudged Ren any of his popularity. He had tried to give as much of his best as he could to Haichi and their unborn child by loving them sincerely – _"I do think about other women, but I only love Hiachi."_. And Reira, whom he had protected and turned to in turn, he had hoped that she would find happiness.

But reality has a bitter taste.

He had accepted that his perfect angel could not thrive in his gilded cage, and he had looked the other way as other men had tainted her in the way he could not being himself to. _Even if he had eventually._ But she was still his, the treasure he held in the palm of his hand. But no matter how he wished it could be not so, a woman can only belong to one man. In keeping Reira as his, she could never ever stop loving him even if he took her to the depths of hell.

But a man often wants more than just one woman.

Hiachi was his wife, his dream of a loving home and family. How could he not love her? How could he not want to make her happy as he laid his hands over her belly, felt the warmth of her lips, and tasted the sweetness of her lovingly-prepared food?

Why would he not sate his lust in the luscious feast laid before his eyes, the utter depravity in enjoying the breasts in his face, the moans of his nameless lover, the smell of lust and sex and cigarettes?

Yet the flower in her hair, the sound of her voice as she sang, the softness of her expression – the same look about her as she sang beside his dying mother's bed, every week, every month, for years – Takumi knows he could never cut himself away from Reira as surely as she could never stop loving him.

In the end, it had been his greed. When a man has two treasures, how does he hold on to both?

He looks hopefully, nervously to Haichi's eyes as he comes home, hoping that he can find a glimmer of the adoration that used to light up her eyes at the sight of him… but he sees it only in the eyes of his young daughter who clings to his legs in all the joy of her innocence. She does not know yet that her father has forsaken her mother, and her, his only daughter, to protect the first treasure he had owned since the dark days of his childhood.

Too soon afterwards, he travels again to a place far from his home, where he had offered up his son to regain a fortune he could not relinquish. He listens as Reira, almost mad in her wretched state, sings once again in the presence of a boy whom she cannot recognize as her own.

But for him, she had never sung again.


End file.
